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Colony Club

It was perhaps poor timing in August 2007 when Flavio Briatore, the playboy principal of Renault’s Formula One racing team, announced he would build the Billionaire’s Resort in sunny Malindi, his ex-girlfriend and presumptive business partner Naomi Campbell by his side. Kenya’s coastline has never been called trendy, per se, even if Bill Gates and Angelina Jolie have recently played through several of its white-sand beaches. But Malindi’s local M.P., Gideon Mung’aro, was somehow confident the hotel would “attract queens and kings and other world celebrities,” or so he told the press.

Then came the Christmas holidays, when the world watched rioters jig atop torched cars in the country’s televised postelection violence that left 1,500 dead and a legacy of State Department warnings and some hotel cancellations. The current global banking crisis only ensures that the billionaires’ Gulfstreams will remain grounded on the tarmac in months to come.

But billionaires are hardly a prerequisite for good times. After weeks in sweaty pursuit of big cats and giraffes, honeymooners are still repairing to Kenya’s coast to sun, swim and fish, and scores of Italians reliably turn up year-round in the resort town of Malindi, known as Sardinia Due to those who can’t quite afford Sardinia Uno. There are now 200 or so private villas here that could be rightly classified as splendido, furnished by numerous local home-decorating emporiums and guarded at night by Masai-warrior retainers, a coastal status symbol. The Italian embassy has gone so far as to install a resident consul in town.

Let the backpackers bleat that the town is being “built up”; Malindi is no Miami Beach afflicted by condo creep, and its seafront still reads as seafront just as it did when Ernest Hemingway caught a big sailfish here in the ’30s. A coral reef still defends Malindi’s ramparts from those who travel by yacht; the reconstructed Vasco da Gama pillar is a chess piece on the water commemorating the deal struck in 1498 with the Portuguese to protect Malindi from Mombasan raiders down the shore. The “Sonny” signature graffitied onto the pillar’s base records a later, more informal signing over of Malindi’s soul to an Italian population now numbering approximately 3,000.

It is therefore no surprise that one finds some of Kenya’s better restaurants and shopping here. Teenagers play snooker behind the Crayola-colored produce stalls in the old market, where babies are carried in papoose slings fashioned from kangas, gaudy sarongs blazing with Swahili sayings. But tomatoes and red peppers can’t sing arias without the Parma ham, arborio rice and Umbrian chardonnay sold at the Il Fornaio supermarket. A retiree opened a farm on the outskirts of town, adding pecorino, scamorza and mozzarella to the deli section. (Il Fornaio also has dedicated space for shaving gels and hair products.)

WITH AN OPEN PIPELINE to fine wine and luxe living, Malindi some years ago graduated to its current status as one of the planet’s sunny places for shady people, beckoning narcotics traffickers and sex tourists like Batista’s Havana. In 1990, Gianni Agnelli’s drug-addled only son, Edoardo, was arrested here for possession, but generally speaking, vice in Malindi doesn’t parade down the beach on stilts. It is only implied, merely alluded to by one’s bar-stool neighbors. “There are people here fleeing the sheriff, their wives, their lives,” one settler admits. A lot of spaghetti gets thrown against the wall, about the retired Mafia hit man who opened a trattoria here; the genial businessman said to be married to Meyer Lansky’s daughter; the restaurateur up on charges back home for pedophilia.

And though the mud flaps of a school bus passing through town evenly proclaim GOD IS GOD, coastal Kenya — where millions are Muslim, and muezzin calls compete in the palmy breeze — remains an equally hospitable haven to Al Qaeda: Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, who is accused of brainstorming the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania and the surface-to-air missile attack that barely missed an Israel-bound airplane in 2002, was in town this August playing Where’s Waldo with law enforcement, reportedly bleaching his skin to pass as an Arab. Police unsuccessfully swarmed through his Malindi hideout only to find a recently vacated kikoi (another Kenyan riff on the sarong), the TV on and food on the table.

None of this has discouraged Briatore, 58, a maestro marketer who long ago helped introduce the Benetton brand to the United States. (Few recall that Briatore high-tailed it from Italy in the late ’70s to escape a prison sentence for fraud.) Some 14 years ago, he turned up here, soon purchasing a house he called Lion in the Sun, in the upscale Casuarina district. Last year, what had been Briatore’s own vacation home opened for business as a combination hotel and thalassotherapy spa.

Do not call Lion in the Sun a fat farm, even if the resort may be pushing a fascist lifestyle at total odds with the character of its founder, a man of careening appetites. Before he married the 28-year-old Wonderbra model Elisabetta Gregoraci this year, after a cancer scare, he spent significant time knocking models off their feet like bowling pins. (Briatore most famously refuses to confirm paternity of a child borne by Heidi Klum, the “Project Runway” hostess.) Home is now London, where Briatore co-owns the Queens Park Rangers soccer team and the tabloids make sport of his blue-tinted rock-star spectacles and his “distinctly flabby” intercontinental beach presence. One can’t help thinking of Hemingway’s old man wrestling with his marlin, who, refusing to admit defeat, dreams only of the frolicking lion cubs he’d seen as a young man on the sun-parched beaches of Africa.

“Mr. Flavio is the richest man in Italy,” says the teenager in charge of the pink terry sun loungers costing $9 a day at the Rosada beach club, a three-minute drive from Lion in the Sun. His name tag reads “Piero” (everyone wears one in Malindi), though his real Giriama-tribe name is Eban. Eban-Piero recalls a scene that plays like Fellini: the day Mr. Flavio walked down the beach, passing out 1,000 shilling notes to a squawking crowd of hundreds.

The Rosada’s improbably sceney and chic ristorante could have been cast by Fellini’s file cabinet, filled with hundreds of pictures of actors with antic faces and Coney Island bodies. The women of the Rosada don’t bother with colorful kikoi wraps, as do the Anglo-Kenyans; most are blithely unaware of Italy’s own colonial history in East Africa, which effectively ended with Mussolini swaying from a meat hook. They camp here all afternoon to smoke, play cards and eat fritto misto. Sotto voce, the locals call the more overbearing Italian men Rambos. The overcooked glamma-gals who impatiently clap their hands for service are malayas — hookers in Swahili. This is not necessarily the crema di eleganza, but the Italianacci, “the worst of the worst of the worst,” says a visiting Italian journalist.

The Italians convene at the casino at night, where wealthy men sip espresso or eat spaghetti at roulette wheels operated by black-tie croupiers. There are beautiful women, and there are those women who are maintaining (and whose definition of maintaining is to make themselves up like Donatella Versace). A midget plays Indian Ocean stud poker as the men remember how the space race brought the Italians here after the Korean War and their space station, built on floating platforms, could always be towed away if the Kenyans got restless.

Farther down the main commercial strip that is Lamu Road, the Star Dust disco is holding a bodybuilding championship, overrun by the prostitutes in five-inch heels who are everywhere in Kenya but stand out less at the swanky Morgan’s Bar at Fermento across the street, with its moody Miami lighting and club chairs with arms like elephant tusks. The $5 admission fee, payable on the way out, is all the incentive the girls need to leave accompanied, however badly. A sign on the bathroom wall admonishes: NO! TURISMO SESSUALE MINORILE. “Tourists should refrain from having sex with minors” (in so many words).

THIS IS NOT TO SAY that Malindi is entirely devoid of culture: the Picasso in residence is Armando Tanzini, an Italian-born sculptor who has exhibited at the Venice Biennale; his work is all over the Lion in the Sun, where he has a fan in Briatore. “This is the only place where Mr. Briatore is able to really relax,” insists Dr. Pierino Liana, Briatore’s local point person. “Unfortunately, now we have mobile phones. Just a few years ago, the mobile phone was not working here.”

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Inside the well-guarded gates of Lion in the Sun, smooth jazz moans from fake-rock speakers incorporated into several saltwater-swimming-pool areas — as if some bar mitzvah is partying on in the distance. A personal trainer empurpled in Olivia Newton-John-era Lycra supervises a media executive chugging around the property who has lost 12 pounds in a week through a combination of grueling exercise and massage aided by glassy suction cups that could do equal justice to a well-chilled pinot grigio. Guests catch up on back issues of the Milan daily Corriere della Sera at the beauty salon.

Lion in the Sun is one of the few Malindi resorts across the street from — and not explicitly on — the ocean. The staff (rather implausibly) affirms this as a positive, a prophylactic against the paparazzi. (A boat ferries guests to a more private beach in Mayungu where Mr. Flavio has lately been snapping up property.) “Normally, our people don’t like to mix with other people,” says the resort’s operation manager, Sabina Vivaldi.

If Lion in the Sun is any indication, Mr. Flavio must learn what blisses out the billionaires: these rooms are the darkest of bungled bungalows. Mosquito netting has been worked into the windowpanes instead of the usual canopies over the bed; this is Africa for people who don’t want to take their Malarone, only nobody told the mosquitoes, who enter just as easily via the front door. Those here for the bio-light diet are cordially “not allowed” to order room service, says the menu. It matters not that laundry is free if a room proves perversely unlivable, its pillows Poly-Fil, its bedspread rough on the skin, the showerhead too high an altitude. The custom metal door handles around the property are actually serrated. Responsibility for the design has fallen not to an experienced architect but to Dr. Liana, who cheerfully admits he originally came to Africa to investigate a suspected case of Ebola up country. Only he really always wanted to be a decorator.

Spain’s former prime minister José María Aznar and Bono en famille recently checked into Lion in the Sun, but it is hard to imagine Briatore here, and there are few personal effects in evidence; a Peter Beard photograph on the wall inscribed, “To the great tax victim and partner in crime. . . .” is an exception. Locals say Briatore had actually wanted to move to the Indian Ocean Lodge, a former resort nearby on the water, where, like Gatsby’s mansion, it shows up well, a whitewashed wedding cake on a high coral shelf. But it is now rumored that he has put that property up for sale, and Vivaldi confirms that Briatore is considering building a “presidential suite” for himself on the grounds of Lion in the Sun.

Better to check in for the time being at the nearby Kilili Baharini, with its bungalow verandas, stylish pili-pili daybeds on the beach and breakfast delivered under netted domes. Galana-stone swimming pools somehow look more proportionate here, as does the film-set spa and the gym equipment laid out on the beach under makuti thatching.

The British travel 45 minutes by car down the coast to Watamu for superior “goggling” (that’s snorkeling, in American) and deep-sea fishing at Hemingways, where the high season runs from November to March after the seaweed drifts up to Malindi. Afternoon tea is served in the bar under the dead-eyed gaze of a 636-pound black marlin somebody caught a few years ago. Next door, the Ocean Sports hotel plays host to a 5 p.m. weighing of the day’s catch. A boat owned by the Ocean Sports founder was swallowed up by the clubhouse years ago and repurposed as a bar. IAN PRICHARD CAME FROM MOMBASA IN THIS BOAT AND STAKED HIS CLAIM RIGHT HERE, reads the sign. So, too, did the windsurfing Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, who spent her girlhood in Somalia and reports five times a year to Santa Angela, her Caribbean-style beach house in Watamu.

“There is tranquility here,” says Naomi Campbell, parachuting back into Malindi town after the riots. Campbell promised Kenya a modeling academy and a rehab center —as well as a school for children, but only if the town upgraded roads and the airport to better accommodate the anticipated billionaire jets.

But the plans are in the icebox at the moment as Briatore reconsiders opening this hotel-casino on the grounds that there may not be enough billionaires around for some time to sustain the place. It is not because the local turtle people went a bit nuts, Dr. Liana insists. Activists were maintaining that the increased foot traffic one might expect from such an addition would destroy the golf-ball-size eggs of critically endangered turtles nesting on an adjacent beach. (Briatore disputes this; to view one exception to the rule, a turtle who is thriving on the tourist trade, seek out the 330-pound teenage Galapagos tortoise at the local falconry, who puts away 30 bananas a day.)

“We are not spoiling the last immaculate thing on the coast,” Dr. Liana complains. The resort — like the wonderful Fellini production that is Malindi — remains in turnaround. Turtle hatchlings, much like affluent travelers, are guided by the reflection of the moon in the water. One hopes the moon will shine again on Malindi.